


when i first saw you, the end was soon.

by judypoovey



Series: i'd be appalled if i saw you ever try to be a saint [3]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Anxiety, Christmas, F/F, Found Family, Gen, Useless Disaster Lesbians, incredibly mild period typical homophobia in the background that doesnt come up a lot
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-07
Updated: 2019-09-27
Packaged: 2020-10-11 21:36:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20553071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/judypoovey/pseuds/judypoovey
Summary: Robin’s dealing with a lot of firsts in 1986: her first Christmas since her parents rejected her, her first sort-of relationship (with a super-powered badass vigilante), and her first few weeks in her new career as a monster hunter for Dr. Owens, especially when her roommates' video camera is picking up freaky Upside Down monsters and the mad scientist responsible for them is still on the loose.It’s been a long year.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this is a fairly direct sequel to my Karen-centric fic [if everything's a season, then i'm a setting sun](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19879261/chapters/47082331), though with a focus on a completely different set of characters, so if you really don't wanna read it, i don't think it'd be IMPOSSIBLE to follow this one.

Christmas season had seized Hawkins precisely five minutes after the turkey had been put away to be scavenged for leftovers at a later date.

It would be Robin’s first Christmas since she’d left home, and not on particularly good terms. She wasn’t sure what she had been thinking – maybe she’d been emboldened by Steve’s stalwart acceptance and the kids not even thinking it was weird – but coming out to her mom and dad had been a disaster, and she’d moved out in a hurry after it. It had been March.

They still talked once a month or so. She thought maybe her mom hoped that she was spontaneously announce she had actually been dating Steve this whole time and it was all a big prank, but she didn’t have high hopes for Christmas, especially since Thanksgiving with Nana had been so painfully uncomfortable she’d left halfway through and finished her Thanksgiving at the Hendersons.

She hadn’t called back since, and it had been a week and a half.

Their apartment was nominally three bedrooms, but they were tiny and crammed together, offering no privacy for anyone, which meant that Robin was far too intimately aware of Steve and Keith’s unfortunate comings and goings.

(They had needed an extra roommate and Keith had needed to escape his mom’s house. It had been their only option, with Jonathan in Illinois and Nancy leaving for college.)

It also meant that the rare weekends when Kali Prasad visited were always punctuated by awkwardness.

She had met Kali just a few months ago, helping fight against the evil scientist who had unleashed even more Soviets and monsters upon the world in his hunt to destroy El. It was not the first time she’d ever met another girl like her – after the Starcourt fire she’d gone on a date with Janet Knudsen – but it was the first time that her interest wasn’t founded exclusively on the fact that they both liked girls.

Since the August fire that had claimed Kali’s home and allowed Martin Brenner to slip away once again, Kali and her family had been traveling around, hunting for leads, trying to find the scientist.

As such, it wasn’t like they were girlfriends. They weren’t. She visited, and they kissed. And she felt queasy and weird when Kali looked at her, and she worried about her a lot, but they had distinctly settled on not being girlfriends, because Kali had to finish her mission.

Robin pretended to understand.

She wished she could just go with Kali. To help her find Brenner and end the whole thing, so maybe they could hold hands and go out to dinner, or something. Not in public, but… well. _Something_.

She hadn’t even broached the subject of Christmas, because the thought of it filled her with a sort of dread that she didn’t want to dump all over anyone. Not even Steve really knew the depths of which she was dreading Christmas.

“Dottie, you have a perfect face for film,” Keith said, his eye attached to the eyepiece of the camera his Grandmother had gotten him for his birthday a month past. That was the other unfortunate thing about sharing a living space. It was inevitable that everyone’s paths crossed.

“Horror movies, you mean?” she snarked back.

Keith frowned. “No. I mean, as the leading lady, maybe.”

Dottie didn’t seem to believe that he was calling her pretty, so she just adjusted her sweater and continued waiting for Kali to put on her shoes, ending another weekend visit.

Robin had hidden the second boot deep under the couch…just to buy those extra few minutes.

She was sure Kali had figured it out.

“I’ll be back by soon,” she said, squeezing Robin’s hand.

“Be safe!”

Robin sat on the couch, contemplating the particular shade of teal that was streaked into Kali’s hair as they disappeared from the shoebox sized apartment. She knew Keith still had his camera on, but she didn’t care.

Steve edged his way into her orbit slowly.

“Here we have the wild Robin in its natural state,” he said, quietly, in his best Nature Documentary Voice, staring at the camera. He and Keith had bonded over being awkward doofuses, and Robin deeply regretted introducing them. “Pining over a mate. Notice the faint coloration in the cheeks.”

Sticking her hand in Steve’s face, she shoved him off and flipped Keith off for good measure. “Get bent, losers.”

“Your girlfriend is so cool, I still don’t know how you managed it,” Keith said, laughing and shutting the camera off.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Robin insisted, pushing herself off their street-corner couch to go fix herself a glass of water.

“That’s not how it sounded last night,” Keith teased, Steve making exaggerated kissy noises in the background.

Next time, she’d see if Mrs. Wheeler would let her crash in her guest room when Kali visited, because she couldn’t stand these lunatics.

Chugging a glass of water, distracting herself from what had now turned into a bickering contest over who got the TV (as if they had more than two channels on a good day), she was the first one to hear the knock at the door.

She opened it as Steve slid off the couch onto the floor, a sure sign of defeat, to find the dark suit wearing Dr. Owens standing there, looking around politely, as if this wasn’t a pathetically tiny apartment over the top of a general store.

“Uhm. Hello, sir,” she said, a little strangled.

“Can we talk outside, Miss Buckley? I thought Mr. Harrington might come too.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've had the worst fucking week but comments will sustain me

“I don’t know what to do,” she said, her head in her arms against the table.

“I think we just do it,” Steve said, unhelpful. He never understood the great and powerful angst that came with decision making, he just kind of did things and if he screwed up, so what? He didn’t agonize like Robin did. On the one hand, it was why they made such a good team, but on the other hand it was why she wanted to kill him right now.

Karen Wheeler was writing a pro and con list on Robin’s trusty white board, trying to find the answer through talking it out and not making impulse decisions like Steve.

“So…pro of taking up Dr. Owens’ offer,” she said.

“Helping hunt down Brenner and protecting Hawkins and the kids,” Steve said automatically.

“Cons of taking up Owens’ offer.”

“Working for the government. Working with people who used to work at the lab where they tortured El and Kali,” Robin said, raising a hand but not her head. “Putting ourselves in even more danger than usual. Having to protect this ridiculous town, meaning we never really escape it.”

“Oh, another pro, steady paying job,” Steve said.

Karen’s neatly loopy handwriting filled the board as they went back and forth.

Sam Owens had come to Hawkins to offer them (that is, Robin and Steve) an arrangement to help him potentially head off any future issues with the Upside Down, Martin Brenner, or the Gate. They accepted special training from Owens’ organization and became like him. Hunting interdimensional anomalies and mad scientists.

For two kids who had precisely no college or career prospects, it was certainly attractive. Government work came with a steady salary.

But Kali didn’t trust Owens, even if he had proven to be helpful and sympathetic to her during their encounter in August. Robin didn’t blame her, because she didn’t really trust Owens either.

“What would Nancy say?” Steve asked when their list came up a dead even tie. That was his other solution to most problems: defer to Jonathan or Nancy.

Karen was already dialing the phone.

“I think Nancy would say not to trust the government,” Robin suggested, knowing that her opinion was likely to be slightly more nuanced than that, but hoping that she would at least validate Robin’s hesitation.

Knowing Nancy a little better than she had in high school, she still thought the truth would be something boring and practical like ‘isn’t a career opportunity more important than a girlfriend, Robin?’ and she’d be right, but wrong too, because… Well. Robin didn’t know.

“Nance wants to talk to you,” Karen said, a gentle tap on her shoulder rousing her from her dramatics.

“Go for Robin,” she said reflexively as she nestled the phone between her shoulder and her ear.

“You made a pro and con list?” Nancy asked.

“Dead tie.”

“Why doesn’t one of you take the offer and one of you reject it?” she asked, a question that none of the three of them had ever even considered in the flurry of talking to Owens, begging off work to come ask Mrs. Wheeler for advice, and the whole mess of nonsense.

“…What?”

“I mean, Steve takes the job and you don’t, and you still get to help him but you have plausible deniability if Kali doesn’t like it,” she said, as if it were oh-so-obvious. “I don’t think it’s an all-or-none scenario for Owens.”

“I didn’t even…dammit. Why did the only smart one move a hundred miles away?” she said, shaking her head.

“Hey!” Steve protested.

Robin aggressively waved him off. “Are you visiting soon?”

“The semester is over next week, I’ll be home for a month or so,” she said. “Owens must have a lead if he’s asking for help after being silent for so long. I might make a pit stop in Illinois and see what’s up.”

“Oh good, more monsters. Just in time for Christmas.”

“Holidays bring out the worst in people,” Nancy joked.

“I’m giving you back to your mom. See you soon,” she said, handing off the phone and sitting up to face Steve.

“What did she say?” Steve asked.

“What if you took the job and I didn’t?” she asked.

Steve didn’t seem to like that thought. “But we’re a team, come on.”

“I know. I know, augh. This is so!”

“Why don’t you just ask Kali what she thinks?” Karen suggested innocently, as if open and honest communication between two people who might someday have the chance to be in a relationship would ever work.

Robin groaned and slid out of the chair onto the floor, hugging her knees.

“She’ll come out eventually,” Steve told Karen, who peered down at her with concern.

“Do you want a snack, Robin?”

“Yes please.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this was delayed because life is a nightmare but here we go!

They agreed to wait the full week Owens had given them before committing one way or the other. Robin was still torn; sure, she thought the idea of being a trained undercover monster hunter was a cool career path, but she worried that it was too close to the organization that had allowed Brenner free reign to torture and abduct children. Children she now knew personally.

She wanted to help them catch the piece of shit who had done terrible things to them, but she worried that no one else would see it that way.

It was hard to focus on work as she agonized over the decision.

It was even harder to focus on Keith talking about the movie he was making in the woods behind Hawkins, starring Steve and Dustin as a pair of brothers who are being hunted by an invisible (because…budget) monster.

“I say, Dustin has a real knack for acting,” Keith said, rewinding the footage to show her a particularly good take.

Steve delivered his line a little stilted.

“And Harrington’s got the looks,” he added.

Robin tried to unglaze her eyes to watch it, and a bit of motion caught her eye in the corner of the frame. “What was that?” she asked, pointing. He rewound the clip again, and they both leaned in. The shape was vaguely human but it sent a chill down Robin’s spine. It looked _too_ familiar, evoking the dark corridors of a Chicago building a few months past.

“Maybe it’s a double exposure? That doesn’t make sense, though. That’s…really weird.”

Steve was in the back unloading the new shipment of tapes, so Robin went to find him. “Steve, check this out,” she said, handing him the camera, Keith trailing along behind him.

“Is that --?” he asked, stopping himself when he saw Keith lingering in the doorway. “Uh, wow. That’s so weird,” he said, a much better actor than he had been in the clip, if Robin could say so herself.

“Well, don’t hog it Harrington, I gotta get this to the editing room,” he said, crossing the room to pluck it out of Steve’s hands, before they could muster some faint excuse about taking it so that they could take it to their meeting with Owens.

“We’ll just have to tell him about it, I guess,” Steve said, though for a brief moment Robin weighed the pros and cons.

“What if they like…want to eliminate the witness?” she said, though that did sound profoundly ridiculous. She didn’t think that was necessarily Dr. Owens’ style, but honestly stranger things had happened.

“I think we could convince them that Keith isn’t a threat to national security,” he said.

This was fair.

So they met with Owens at the diner in town. Their only agreed upon security measure was that, without Owens knowing, they’d asked Karen to be in the diner, near the payphone, so that if there was a need to call backup, they could do so quickly without alerting attention. What Hopper or Mrs. Byers could do from Illinois was a mystery, but it felt good to know that they could be told quickly if something suspicious happened.

“So, you’ve given my offer a lot of thought, it seems,” he said, as the waitress brought them their drinks. He ordered a Reuben. “It’s on me, whatever you kids want.”

As tempting as diner lobster was, Robin settled for a tuna melt, and Steve got the turkey club.

“Yeah, we’re taking your offer,” Steve said.

“Steve!” Robin protested. “I thought…”

“Oh, you were gonna end up taking it.”

“Well, I mean, yeah, but you gotta let me say it! You can’t just talk for me, I’m not a baby.” She slapped him gently on the arm as he apologized and slid down in the booth a little. “Yeah, we’re taking the offer.”

She’d find a way to explain it to Kali, right?

“All right. Here are two cards with the number to reach me with your new callsigns on them,” he said. “We’ll set up a formal briefing for…how’s Wednesday?”

Wednesday was their day off, the day Keith begrudgingly ran the store solo, because no one came in on Wednesdays. Owens knew their schedule, and the thought of it sent a chill down Robin’s spine. This was too damn big for two nineteen-year-old dipshits. But it would keep their friends safe, right?

“My call sign is King Cold? What the heck?”

“It’s funny, because of the ice cream,” she said sagely, because her callsign was Odessa Steps, which was a historical massacre in tsarist Russia, and much cooler than a joke at the expense of Steve’s high school reputation and the terrible job that had gotten them into this mess.

And Nancy would be back from school that following Saturday, and she would want to be kept informed.

“There’s another thing,” Robin said after the waitress dropped off their sandwiches. She took a bite. It was mediocre, as far as tuna melts went, but it’d do. “Our friend is shooting a movie out in the woods…and when we were looking back over the footage we saw...something…at the edge of the frame.”

Owens’ small joy at the sight of his Rueben immediately faltered. “Oh?”

“It looked like a Demogorgon,” Steve said, dropping his voice. “This happened a couple years ago…Jonathan picked it up on his camera.”

Owens dipped his fry in ketchup a few times, thoughtfully. “We’ll need to see your friend’s camera, obviously.”

“I don’t know how to get it off of him naturally,” Robin said.

“I might have an idea,” Owens said.

That evening, at home doing their normal evening routine, griping about work and getting ready to watch Golden Girls, there was a knock at the door.

Keith answered, having been relegated to popcorn duty.

“Keith Feldstein?” Dr. Owens asked.

“Uh, yeah…?”

“I heard you had some very interesting abilities with a video camera,” he said. “I might have a job for you, if you think you can handle it.”

Keith gaped back at Steve and Robin, who openly gawked back at him. Really, after all this, they’d _still_ have to work with Keith?


End file.
